School society

With a few exceptions, everyone I know was miserable in high school. Pretty uniformly, everyone hated it. Everyone has a story about how they were picked on and tormented in school, how they wanted to (or did) just drop out or go to college early. So I’ve always felt a little weird that while I was definitely part of the group of people who you’d expect to come out of high school hating it, I didn’t have a problem with it.

Most of my friends were in the “loser” crowd, which was sort of an umbrella group for the nerds (I was in chess club), the stoners (I played bass in a reggae band–draw your own conclusions), and the poor (I guess by high school my family had pulled itself up pretty well, but we certainly didn’t have the kind of money the Laurelhurst crowd did). So, was I a loser? Probably. But I also had some friends in the popular crowd, and I don’t remember anybody picking on me for being smart, playing chess, editing a poetry zine, or any of the other things that I would have expected to get tormented for. Why not?

I suspect that it had something to do with my attitude. A lot of people will say that they didn’t take high school seriously, but if they hated high school I suspect what they mean is that they were on to the fact that the academic part of high school didn’t matter much. When I say I didn’t take it seriously, I mean all of it. I learned Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom early on, and took it to heart. (No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn’t care less.) I think people knew that about me, and where’s the fun in picking on someone who just doesn’t care?

In middle school, while I was waiting for the bus one day, one of the somewhat popular bullies tapped the ash from his cigarette onto my shoulder. I guess he was looking for a reaction from me. My reaction was to watch the smoldering ash burn through my shirt and t-shirt. Before it could really burn me, or set my clothes on fire, the bully got scared and patted the ash out himself. It’s one thing to torment someone; it’s another to actually set him on fire. I’m pretty sure that when he understood that I’d rather catch fire than let him get a rise out of me, he thought I was crazy. And he never bothered me again.

But that was all more than ten years ago. Why am I thinking of it now? Because I just read a good essay about school life by Paul Graham (who also has a number of interesting things to say on the subjects of spam and programming). It’s called “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

Merely understanding the situation they’re in should make it less painful. Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It’s hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school.

It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.—Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular

8 thoughts on “School society”

Wow, what a cool article. Makes me want to save it to show to my kids when they reach that age. This part struck me particularly, especially given that I very much dislike suburbia…

“I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.”

Actually, we talked about this topic quite a bit in my media history of the 1950’s class. The concept of the artificially created designation “teenager” and the frustration and insanity it caused in those so labled was the main theme in Rebel Without a Cause and many other similar movies from the time period. Just another clue that the way we run our fragmented industriallized society isn’t healthy for us.

I never had a problem, but I had very active parenting, with a very strong focus on not allowing oneself be victimized by the surroundings and not caring what others think. I was lucky to have involved parents to bring these strange juvenille societal conciets into context…I can only imagine the mess I would have made of things without them.

Maybe I am missing his meaning (having only had time to read the quote and not the article), but I find myself disagreeing with this: “It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing …”

To me, that sounds a bit like saying that the world is an illusion. Well, okay, maybe it is — but you’re still spending a great deal of your life there.

Your cigarette story, by the way, is one of several really great things I’ve read today.

My high school was wonderful change from the elementary school where I had to fight (or let them to beat me up) several times a day. I never had to fight again, since going to the high school. Even the cafeteria food was less terrifying there.

Screw the active parenting theory: It is the presence of decent normal people and absence of dumb bullies that made the difference.